Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Margaret Wente and The Washington Post

I
was reminded of this recently.Back in
2009 (along with a number of other issues) I alerted The Globe and Mail to some
similarities between a March 31, 2009 column by Margaret Wente and a March 30
column by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. They begin like this:

Milbank:
Has Barack Obama got a deal for you!
"If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get
your car serviced and repaired, just like always," the president announced
from the Grand Foyer of the White House this morning.

And that's not
all! "Your warranty will be safe," the salesman-in-chief went on.
"In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been, because, starting today,
the United States government will stand behind your warranty." And check
out these incentives!

Wente:Hey there, folks! My name is Barry O., and
I'm not gonna mess around. Your GM franchise is under new management. Let me
say it as plainly as I can: If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors,
you'll be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your
warranty will be safe. In fact, it'll be safer than it's ever been. Because
starting today, the U.S. government will stand behind it. So come on down! The
deals are unbelievable. Just look for the giant gorilla hanging from the roof.

Milbank
extends his satirical take on the president – who he calls the “salesman
in chief” - with, “If you act today, he may even throw in the
floor mats”, and later, "Will he throw in a few oil
changes?"

Wente
also uses the “salesman in chief” line elsewhere in her column, along with similar
or identical language and imagery: “He did everything but throw in a set of
floor mats and a free oil change”.

I
received a reply from The Globe saying, “These were comments of a kind naturally
suggested by Barack Obama's announcement. The words that are identical are
words directly quoted from Mr. Obama.”

A
couple of obvious problems with this; one, it doesn’t address the bits of identical
or near identical language not directly
quoted from Obama, and more importantly, the opening of Wente’s column actually contains no quotation marks to indicate which (if
any) words are “directly quoted” from President Obama.

Milbank’s
version, above, properly puts Obama’s words in quotes, so the reader can
distinguish what was a real (and significant) announcement from a journalist’s humor,
comment, or criticism.Despite the
Globe’s claim, Ms. Wente’s version contains no punctuation to indicate where
the president’s words begin or end.That
would seem a fairly egregious omission.Imagine the implications, if one can add, subtract, or move quotation
marks at will?As we’ve noted, missing
or migrating quotation marks frequently enough with Ms. Wente.Are such mash-ups acceptable at Canada’s
“newspaper of record”?

But
one is entitled to wonder if she had indeed scanned The Washington Post website.Particularly when there are other overlaps of
prose apparently from the same day Milbank’s column was published (March 30).For example, the sentence below appears on
their site as the caption to an embedded video accompanying The Post’s report
about the GM bailout.

Washington
Post:The White House says neither
General Motors nor Chrysler submitted acceptable plans to receive more bailout
money, setting the stage for a crisis in Detroit that would dramatically
reshape the nation's auto industry.

Wente:The White House says neither General Motors
nor Chrysler submitted acceptable plans to receive more bailout money, setting
the stage for a crisis in Detroit that would dramatically reshape the nation's
auto industry.

Again,
this is just one of many such queries about Ms. Wente’s attribution practices.Here’s another.

When it appeared, similarities between Margaret Wente’s
November 2010 column and an October article by Charles Murray
in The Washington Post were notedby others.Wente’s column contains what she describes as
a “patented Elite-O-Meter
quiz”.Not sure that patent would
stand up.

In an October MacLean's
post, Luiza Ch. Savage observed that she couldn’t find a link to the original ‘elite’
quiz that ran in The Washington Post, so she reproduces it. Claire Berlinskion The Daily Caller (and on the Ricochet site), created a similar,
related quiz, based on Murray’s - again, with links to The Post and
acknowledgement of the previous mock questionnaire.Wente does add some “Canadian content” to her
version, but a surprising amount of the content is similar – she doesn’t even bother to throw in a hockey
reference.Some comparisons here:

Wente: …What do
these initials stand for?NPR (+10 if you know) MMA (-20 if you know)

Washington Post:Do you known what MMA and UFC stand for?
Yes/No

Wente:…Who is Jimmie Johnson (not the football
coach)?(-40)

Washington Post:Do you know who Jimmi Johnson
is? (The really famous one, not the football coach.) Yes/No

Wente:To get some exercise, you preferYoga and Pilates (+10) Hunting and fishing (-20)

Washington Post:5. Can you hold forth
animatedly about yoga? … How about pilates?

Wente:As an adult, have you ever lived in a small
town for at least a year? (University towns don't count.)(-20)

Washington Post:
Have you ever lived in a town with fewer than 25,000 people? (During college
doesn’t count.) Yes/No

Wente:Have you ever read a book by Tim LaHaye?(-20)

Washington Post:Can you named the authors of the
“Left Behind” series? (Tim LaHaye) Yes/No

Wente:Your idea of good TV is:The Sopranos or Mad Men (+20)Oprah
or The Price is Right (-20)

Washington Post:…they can probably talk about a
few trendy shows -- "Mad
Men" now, "The
Sopranos" a few years ago. But they
haven't any idea who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right."
They know who Oprah is, but they've never watched one of her shows from
beginning to end.

And
there’s other stuff; Wente doesn’t actually introduce Murray until about half
way through her piece, where she notes his recent article in The Post and offers
him credit for“providing the
inspiration and some of the content for the Elite-O-Meter.”Not sure this is quite enough, given how much her column relies on
his.And unlike Savage in MacLean’s, she
doesn’t actually tell readers that The Post ran its own quiz, before her “patented”
version appeared.

Other similarities
may not amount to the level of plagiarism
noted by Wente’s colleagues and assorted experts in past
instances, but they don’t demonstrate much in the way of originality
either.

Starting
with her first paragraph (well before she mentions him), Wente echoes the ideas
in Murray’s introduction; like him, she begins with the Tea Party, then notes what
she calls the ‘anti-anti-elite’ reaction – not unlike Murray’s examples of
Maureen Dowd and company.And just like
Murray, she singles out Richard Florida’s “creative class” as emblematic of the
new supposed elite.

Wente:If you are on the plus side of the
Elite-O-Meter, there's a good chance you belong to Richard Florida's Creative
Class.

She
echoes Murray’s ideas about the university’s role in creating the new
“meritocracy”.

Murray:…membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and
universities. In the idealized view of the meritocrats… now they are peopled by
youth from all backgrounds...

Wente:You are
the product of the modern meritocracy.Although your family may have come from humble origins, you have joined
the ruling class - the one that runs our major institutions...

Here we
see we see Murray’s ideas (and some specific terminology like “social churn”):

Murray:When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw
social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their
parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two…

Wente:A
generation ago, as our higher education system opened up to everyone, there was
enormous social churn as people from formerly excluded groups got their chance.

The
“bubble” language and ideas are also similar:

Murray: …many of them have been ensconced
in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of
privilege…When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble…

Wente: … But they've grown up in a
bubble, and they will go on to work in the same bubble.

Murray:The New Elite marry each other, combining
their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the
benefit of both.

Wente:These people married other seriously gifted
people, and had seriously gifted children who are now graduating at the top of
their class and marrying each other…

As one commenter put it on The Globe’s website, “Wente
clearly fails the Are You a Plagiarist Quiz. http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/25/quiz-are-you-elite/ She
lifts the Jimmie Johnson question right down to the "not the football
coach" in parentheses part.”(That 2010 comment was before The Globe
started systematically removing any mention of plagiarism from Wente’s comments
following the scandal that resulted in her being “disciplined” in 2012.Seems Globe
elites have made sure that little people don’t get to exercise the same ‘freedom
of speech’ reserved for well-paid columnists).

I won't comment on the kind of reverse identity politics
favoured by Ms. Wente and those from whom she borrows, like Charles
Murray, author of The Bell Curve,
a book described
by some as a “synthesis of the work of
disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists”.(For those unfamiliar with it, that book
claims Blacks and Latinos are less intelligent than Whites and Asians.It benefited from financing by The Pioneer
Fund, which, says ABC
News, “has promoted the study of racial purity as an ideal… the Pioneer
Fund contributed $3.5 million to researchers cited in The Bell Curve”.These
“researchers” include people who think, “incompetent cultures should
be phased out.”)

Wente, (a true ultra elite herself) concludes with
a bit of advice for “latte lass” (a recurring caricature): “Go
to Tim Hortons for a change”, she admonishes. “As
Bill Clinton once put it, ‘Some of us are going to cross the street, folks.’"Funnily enough, Bill Clinton’s statement "Some
of us are gonna have to cross the street, folks",was not made in reference to
Murray, but to Bill Bishop, whose book The
Big Sort, is a more intelligent read.

And
speaking of ‘crossing the street’, Ms. Wente could certainly have done just
that when the Occupy Protests were happening.I’m sure if she’d climbed down from her condo tower, to do some real journalistic work,
she could have found a real person to interview, rather than borrowing that
unfortunate non-Occupier, "John".